….MK Dov Lipman (Yesh Atid) said US demands for a cease-fire contradict its canceling flights and issuing travel warnings.

“If we are being asked to hold our fire, we must have already succeeded in restoring peace and quiet. If it is unsafe for flights and US citizens to come to Israel, then we clearly have more fighting to do to protect ourselves from Hamas. Some clarifications and explaining is certainly in order,” he said.

MK Danny Danon (Likud) pointed out that many airlines from countries that are less friendly to Israel than the US did not cancel flights.

“I hope this decision will be changed and will not help Hamas’s psychological warfare,” Danon said…….

The shooting down of the Malaysia Airlines passenger jet over eastern Ukraine's troubled skies last week has already sparked questions among aviation executives and regulators about the global system for avoiding unsafe airspace.

At the same time, a spate of regional conflicts far from eastern Ukraine are also targeting aircraft—convulsing airports that, while located in tense regions, had until recently been viewed by the aviation industry as relatively safe for travelers.

On Tuesday, Delta Air Lines Inc., United Continental Holdings Inc., American Airlines Group, Air Canada and a handful of European carriers suspended service to Israel after a rocket that was fired from Gaza landed near Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration imposed a temporary flight ban to the airport on U.S. carriers, and its European counterpart was poised to follow suit.

A spokeswoman for Israeli flag carrier El Al confirmed the airline is flying as scheduled.

Israeli forces are locked in a fierce ground war with Hamas, the Islamist political and militant group that the U.S. labels a terrorist organization. Hamas, meanwhile, has showered parts of Israel with increasingly sophisticated rockets that are launched at ground targets. Though unlike the Buk antiaircraft system allegedly used against Flight 17, they can still damage planes at the airport.

In addition to serving Jerusalem and Israel's business hub of Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion International Airport has become the gateway for a flood of global tech-industry executives, bankers and venture capitalists flying to and from country's booming technology firms.

The violence hasn't been restricted to Ukraine and Israel. Over the past weekend, four empty Libyan jetliners were set aflame during an insurgent assault against Tripoli's international airport.

Then a week ago, Kabul's international airport came under attack from insurgents using assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. Afghan security forces repelled that attack, but in an earlier raid on the facility, Taliban fighters destroyed the helicopter used by Afghanistan's president. Last month, an insurgent raid on Karachi's main airport killed 28 people and damaged one of Emirates Airline's planes.

Tripoli, Kabul and Karachi aren't frequent stops for Western travelers, but all three serve as important regional hubs. And a steady stream of Western aid workers, diplomats, contractors and—in the case of Tripoli—oil executives give them outsize importance as international air-travel destinations.

None of these recent airport attacks appear to be connected. But their sudden confluence has aviation executives worried the events could spook passengers by again painting commercial aviation as easy pickings for insurgents and terrorists. "The airline community is being targeted," said one senior airline executive. "No other industry suffers like this."

Tel Aviv's airport stayed open on Tuesday, and Israeli aviation officials said it remains safe. Decisions about the safety of a route are mostly left up to individual airlines. But executives and regulators have been on the defensive about how they make those decisions ever since the Malaysia Airlines crash last week.

On Thursday, Flight 17 was plying a well-traveled route over eastern Ukraine, which Kiev authorities had deemed safe. U.S. and Ukrainian officials say it was shot down by a sophisticated antiaircraft weapon.

The incident has raised questions about whether commercial aircraft should have been allowed in the region. There also has been a ratcheting up of scrutiny of commercial overflights of other war zones.

Terrorists have long targeted commercial aircraft, for which accidents often result in high death tolls and big headlines. The industry suffered a spate of hijackings in the 1970s. A bomb brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. And terrorists commandeered four jets on Sept. 11, 2001, crashing two into the World Trade Center in New York and one into the Pentagon in Washington DC. A fourth plane that day crashed in Pennsylvania, as passengers battled the hijackers. The attacks claimed nearly 3,000 victims.

"Aviation has always been a target and it will always be a target," said Philip Baum, managing director of Green Light Ltd., an aviation-security consulting firm in London.

The Malaysia Airlines disaster has some aviation officials and executives calling for a rethink of how aircraft are routed over war-torn territory. On Monday, the Flight Safety Foundation, an internationally recognized aviation-safety advocacy group, said airlines should review their procedures. And executives find themselves on the defensive again.

Shooting down the Malaysia Airlines flight was a terrible crime, said Tony Tyler, chief executive of the International Air Transport Association, or IATA, the airline industry's principal trade body said earlier this week. "But flying remains safe."

—Susan Carey in Chicago and Sara Toth Stub in Jerusalem contributed to this article.

With mounting evidence that Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down by Ukrainian separatist rebels who believed they were engaging a military aircraft, attention is focusing on the Russian-built Almaz-Antey Buk-M1 ground-based air defense system (GBADS) that destroyed the airliner.

The Buk-M1 (SA-11 Gadfly to NATO) can be used by minimally trained operators to deliver a lethal attack, without the safeguards built into other comparable GBADS, an Aviation Week analysis shows. It is also one of the two GBADS — both of Soviet origin — that are most widely distributed in conflict zones with the potential for large-scale, cross-border or civil violence.

The feature that makes the Buk-series weapons uniquely dangerous was introduced in the 1970s when Tikhomirov NIIP, now part of Almaz-Antey, designed the system to replace the 2K12 Kub low-altitude missile system, known to NATO as the SA-6 Gainful. (The similar names are coincidental: "Kub" means "cube" and "Buk" means "beech.")

Kub was exported to Egypt after the destruction of that nation’s air force in a low-level air strike in 1967, and proved lethal in the 1973 Yom Kippur war. But it had a serious weakness in that it could engage only one target at a time. A Kub battery included one radar vehicle and four launch vehicles and used semi-active radar homing (SARH) guidance. The radar vehicle carried two antennas, a search radar and a continuous-wave tracker-illuminator, and the missile homed on to energy from the illuminator beam that was reflected from the target. With one illuminator per battery, the system could not start a second engagement until the previous missile had hit the target.

In the 1982 Lebanon war, the Israel Defense Force – Air Force launched a wave of decoys against Kubs and other GBADS. Once the Kubs locked onto the decoys they were unable to respond to the IDF-AF fighters that appeared next, and were destroyed.

The designers of the replacement Buk system had anticipated this problem. In addition to a new radar vehicle – the Phazotron 9S18M, Snow Drift to NATO – they fitted each launch vehicle with its own X-band multi-mode radar, under a radome on the front of the rotating launch platform. The vehicle is defined as a transporter/erector/launcher and radar (Telar). Similar to a fighter radar, the Telar radar (known to NATO as Fire Dome) has search, track and illuminator functions and can scan through a 120-deg. arc, independent of the movement of the platform.

This feature may have been a crucial factor in the destruction of MH17. The Fire Dome radar’s main job was to permit simultaneous engagement of more targets – one per Telar – under control of the battery’s 9S18M Snow Drift. But the Soviet military and the designers installed a set of backup modes that would permit the Telars to detect and attack targets autonomously, in the event the Snow Drift was shut down or destroyed by NATO’s rapidly improving anti-radar missiles.

The autonomous modes are intended for last-ditch use by the Telar operators, not the more highly trained crews in the battery command vehicle. According to an experienced analyst of Russian-developed radar, the automatic radar modes display targets within range. The operator can then command the system to lock up the target, illuminate and shoot.

Critically, these backup modes also bypass two safety features built into the 9S18M Snow Drift radar: a full-function identification friend-or-foe (IFF) system and non-cooperative target recognition (NCTR) modes. The IFF system uses a separate interrogator located above the main radar antenna and most likely will have been upgraded to current civilian standards.

The 9S18M introduced new NCTR processing technology, according to a 1998 interview with Buk designer Ardalion Rastov. NCTR techniques are closely held, but one of the most basic – jet engine modulation, or the analysis of beats and harmonics in the radar return that are caused by engine fan or compressor blades – should easily discriminate among a 777 with high-bypass turbofans, a turboprop transport or an Su-25 attack fighter.

There is no sign of an IFF interrogator on the Buk Telar’s Fire Dome radar or elsewhere on the vehicle. In normal operation, it would not be necessary since the target’s identity would be verified (according to the prevailing rules of engagement) before target data was passed to the Telar. Other GBADS also leave identification to the main search radar and the command-and-control center; however, the launch units cannot engage and fire without central guidance. The Buk’s combination of lethality and lack of IFF/NCTR is unique.

The Buk-M1 and later derivatives, the M2 and M2E, have been deployed in 14 nations, and are operational in other areas subject to internal conflict. In January 2013, Israel launched an air strike that was apparently intended to destroy a number of Buk-M2E vehicles – the more advanced version – that were being transferred from Syria to Hezbollah forces in Lebanon. In all, Syria is reported to have possessed eight Buk-M2E batteries. Syria also operates as many as 40 S-125 (SA-3 Goa) batteries, which are reportedly being upgraded. These also are medium-range, mobile weapons, but the launch units do not have radar. The same goes for the nation’s aging Kub batteries.

Egypt has 50-plus batteries of S-125, some of which have been modernized, and has been reportedly negotiating orders for Buk-M2E systems. Yemen also has some S-125 systems. Most pre-2003 Iraqi and Libyan GBADS have been destroyed, analysts suggest.

….Meanwhile, there is a case for reviewing the way ­airspace status over conflict zones is rated. At present there is no standardised system. ICAO is the only ­agency with the credibility to run such an advisory system, which can only ever be advisory anyway. But a system where intelligence-based warnings are fed to ICAO, and where it issues a categorised risk level that the airlines understand, would be a good start….

The tragedy of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) has highlighted the aviation industry’s fragmented and uncoordinated
approach to airspace risk assessment, resulting in growing calls from airlines and industry groups for collective action to address this issue.

The scale of the loss of life resulting from the shootdown over Ukraine, and the anger directed at those responsible for the deaths of 298 people, has been the main focus so far. But there is little doubt that change is coming for the industry, with the degree yet to be determined.

MH17 is only the latest example of how widely airlines and national authorities differ in their response to airspace security or safety threats. There is very little in the way of centralized directives and guidance, and much of the responsibility for warnings is placed on the local authorities concerned despite the clear potential for political or financial influence.

Questions that are already being debated include whether individual airlines are sufficiently—and equally—able to make judgments about risk in distant regions, whether threat assessments are adequately handled by the country concerned, and whether there should be a broader mechanism for assessing and sharing recommendations.

While ambitious multinational concepts sound attractive in theory, some industry executives warn that they could be difficult to implement in practice—particularly when it comes to the sensitive topic of sharing intelligence.

In terms of solutions, one airline’s top security executive is skeptical about achieving a multilateral approach. “I don’t believe you can resolve the issue on a purely global level. It involves the sharing of sensitive intelligence and that is difficult enough [because it does not] even happen properly on a national or regional level,” he avers.

However, some type of action is certain. Many airlines and aviation organizations are pushing for representative bodies like the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the International Air Transport Association (IATA) to address the risk-assessment issue, and are calling for summit meetings to be convened.

“I think there will have to be new protocols and it will be up to ICAO, IATA and the aviation community to sort out what the protocols have to be,” Emirates President Tim Clark says.

Clark wants an industry conference to discuss steps that need to be taken, and he emphasizes that “the international airline community needs to respond [to the incident] as an entity.” A Lufthansa official states that “we strongly support such a summit.”

Qantas believes that global aviation bodies are best-suited to identify—and be part of—any solution to risk-assessment issues. “Information-sharing in the aviation industry has always been central to making it safer,” says a Qantas spokesman. “The role of IATA and ICAO as global coordinating bodies for all airlines will be key to any industry response to this tragic incident.”

The Flight Safety Foundation has strong views about what has to happen next. It is calling for a “high-level ministerial meeting to review the systems in place to warn airlines of hostile airspace.”

“Where known threats to civil aviation exist, states should assess and widely publish this information, or close the airspace,” the safety foundaton’s President/CEO Jon Beatty says. “If states cannot discharge their responsibilities to manage their airspace safely, ICAO should play a leading role in alerting or prohibiting airlines from flying through known, hostile airspace.”

The British Airline Pilots Association (Balpa) is calling for ICAO to have stronger powers in order to play a larger role in risk assessment.

“ICAO’s purpose should be to lead where national authorities cannot and it should have the tools to do that,” says Balpa General Secretary Jim McAuslan. “The problem of the absence of a clear international coordination to avoid operations above eastern Ukraine has now become tragically obvious, and to avoid a repeat ICAO should be better resourced and enabled to declare airspace unsafe.”

Airspace safety requires “the right information in the right place at the right time,” says Civil Air Navigation Services Organization (Canso) Director General Jeff Poole. Canso recommends convening a thorough review by a joint high-level task force comprising representatives from ICAO, states, and industry, to consider “responsibilities, the systems and processes to be followed and actions to be taken” in regard to airspace risks in conflict zones.

For its part, IATA emphasizes that state-level action is required. “Governments will need to take the lead in reviewing how airspace risk assessments are made,” says IATA Director General Tony Tyler. “And the industry will do all that it can to assist governments, through ICAO, in the difficult work that lies ahead.”

One of the most notable aspects of the MH17 shootdown is the wide range of risk assessments by airlines operating in the region, which is a major crossroads for both east-west and north-south overflights. While some major airlines had opted to avoid eastern Ukraine routes, most kept using them.

How airlines approach risk assessment will no doubt come under more intense scrutiny—as will the apparent lack of uniformity.

Balpa says that the current system of each airline deciding for itself whether to avoid certain airspace is flawed. This approach “can give an illusion of safety but it is in fact vulnerable to all sorts of influences, including commercial pressure, and so it is not surprising to us that there are differences in the way that this risk is assessed by different airlines,” Balpa states. “That is not good enough.”

Another pilot group, the European Cockpit Association (ECA), states that the MH17 incident “exposed a significant weakness—if not a failure—of international threat and risk assessment in civil aviation.”

ECA President Nico Voorbach says that appropriate risk assessment apparently did occur, but only for the carriers of some countries. It appears that some airlines have access to “very good intelligence and advice from the most powerful national security services . . . while others are left at greater risk.” Information should be shared “in such a way that the highest levels of risk avoidance can be rolled out to all,” says Voorbach.

In some cases, national authorities had issued official prohibitions or warnings to their airlines relating to parts of Ukraine’s airspace. Again, however, their content differed significantly.

The FAA had issued a notice preventing U.S. carriers from operating over Crimea. But this did not apply to the eastern Ukraine until after the shootdown, and U.S. carriers had only voluntarily opted to avoid that area. ICAO had also issued warnings concerning Crimean airspace.

The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) does not have the authority to close airspace or to prohibit any airlines from flying in specific areas. These responsibilities rest with the European member states.

It is standard practice for many international organizations to defer to the country involved to determine if its airspace is safe to operate in. In the wake of MH17, both Eurocontrol and ICAO stressed that it is the duty of local authorities to assess risk and implement restrictions.

In the case of Ukraine, its aviation authorities restricted overflights in the eastern part of the country to 32,000 ft. and above. MH17 was above this level when it was struck by a missile. Eurocontrol—which handles flow control across European airspace—had adhered to Ukrainian airspace restrictions.

This reliance on the aviation authority from the country under threat raises important questions, however. Financial or political pressures could influence its decision to close airspace, particularly if the country involved is in turmoil.

It is unclear if any such issues affected Ukraine’s risk-assessment process. However, it is worth noting that Ukraine’s air navigation service provider UkSATSE was particularly reliant on overflight fees that stemmed from the busy traffic corridors in its airspace.

Some senior European Commission transportation officials are troubled by the notion that it is left entirely up to individual states to decide whether to open, close or restrict parts of their airspace with little need of explanation as to why it has—or has not—done so.

The EC will focus on rectifying this one-sided approach, a source with ties to the commission says, while noting that it will not rush into drafting a “very rapid, overhasty regulation.”

Other examples of fragmented response to airspace issues have occurred recently. Incidents such as volcanic ash plumes and tensions over airline operations in China’s air defense zone demonstrate that the industry does not act in concert during crises.

Another test of airline risk response came on July 22, when a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip landed close to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport. Most airlines were quick to suspend flights to Tel Aviv, perhaps spurred by the wave of criticism directed at airlines following the loss of MH17.

But the response was still far from uniform; Israeli carrier El Al and British Airways continued to operate Tel Aviv services. The FAA temporarily stopped U.S. airlines from flying there—although most carriers had already made that decision—and EASA strongly advised European airlines to avoid the airport until further notice.

Significantly, Israeli aviation authorities did not close the airspace. In fact, Israel urged airlines to keep to their schedules, assuring them that defense systems would be able to protect the airport.

Delta Air Lines was among the first to suspend service to Tel Aviv. During its second-quarter earnings presentation, CEO Richard Anderson gave some interesting insight into the carrier’s risk-assessment process.

Anderson emphasizes that the call to cancel was based on the carrier’s own intelligence-gathering and analysis. “The decision that [we] made…was [taken] well before we heard anything from the FAA,” he says. “A Hamas missile lands a mile from the airport on the north side where we approach on final in a 747 . . . we’re going to make those decisions wholly independent[ly].”

In situations such as this, the carrier may not reinstate flights even when the FAA lifts restrictions, he says.

Delta’s decision-making takes into account intelligence provided by governments, and the carrier has “good cooperation” and regular coordination with both U.S. and foreign officials, Delta’s CEO avers.

While Anderson did not reject the concept of a broader risk-assessment effort, he believes that operational safety decisions are ultimately the airline’s responsibility.

“We have an obligation to make our own risk assessments under our [safety management system] programs,” Anderson says, referring to Delta specifically. “We have a broad and deep security network around the world. We have a very sophisticated capability and methodology to manage these kinds of risks, whether it is [conflicts], or a volcano, or a hurricane.”

However, there are also weaknesses in the airline-specific approach, according to a top security executive with a major international airline that frequently overflies the Ukrainian region.

His airline gathers information through an informal network of sources that comprises other carriers, large corporations in myriad industries and the intelligence community. “The informal networks work well, but they have their limits,” the security executive says. One additional problem is that even in the intelligence community the level of expertise varies greatly from country to country.

In the case of Ukraine, assumptions by airlines and outside experts were proven wrong, notes the executive. The shooting down of an aircraft at cruise altitude was a scenario that no airline had anticipated.

The industry has so far seen shoulder-fired weapons as the main threat (see page 23). But judging threats to aircraft at cruise altitudes is a lot more difficult, the executive posits. “It is impossible to perform a daily risk assessment, because routes are changing every day.

“We rely on the military to keep SAMs [surface-to-air missiles] under control in our security assumptions. In addition to the Ukraine, we see the danger of that no longer being the case in many other places.” He points to failing states in the Middle East such as Syria, Iraq or Libya, where control over arms inventories has been lost.

The executive further criticizes some aviation authorities for lacking the skills and know-how to decide about no-fly zones or limitations in other countries, leaving airlines with little support.

He notes that carriers also avoid some airspace for reasons other than missile threats. His own airline does not fly over Syria because it is concerned air traffic control structures might not function properly.

….The FAA’s latest Notam succeeds succeeds the agency’s earlier guidance, which prohibited flights over Iraq at or below 30,000 feet. The notice prohibits “all flight operations in the Baghdad flight information region…until further advised.” The agency said it will reevaluate the Notam by December 31.

The FAA has also recently prohibited flights over Ukraine following the July 17 missile strike of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 and temporarily to Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport due to fighting in Gaza. Its actions drew crticism from some quarters as being late in the first case, and possibly politically motivated in the latter case.

At the Air Line Pilots Association Air Safety Forum in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Claudio Manno, FAA assistant administrator for security and hazardous materials safety, said the agency in the last year has either issued or updated 10 Notams and six special federal aviation regulations (SFARs). In response to each situation, the agency assembles a crisis response working group of subject-matter experts and a crisis response steering group of deputy administrators to craft its response. It also draws from a “41-chapter” internal crisis management handbook.

“This year we’ve witnessed an evolution in threats from non-state actors, which is something a little bit new, as well as the emergence of conflicts involving nation states in what were previously stable areas of the world,” Manno said. “[I]t’s a different dynamic from what we’ve had to deal with in the past.”…...

...During a two day meeting in Montreal, the Task Force on Risks to Civil Aviation Arising from Conflict Zones, discussed methods to improve countries’ assessing and sharing of conflict zone information, says ICAO in a statement.

“We’re looking for urgent, practical measures to assess these new risks,” says task force chairman David McMillan. McMillan is also head of the Flight Safety Foundation…..

Verfasst am: Mo Sep 01, 2014 08:00:38Titel: "how the pros did it a while back…"

way back when…

Zitat:

….They strapped me into the jump seat of a combat C-130 to see how the pros do it. Apparently the pros fly into a hostile airport with electronic countermeasures to fool the incoming missiles, flares if that doesn’t work, chaff if that doesn’t work, fire suppressant foam in the fuel tanks if that doesn’t work, Kevlar-lined cockpits if that doesn’t work, and everyone gets a flak vest and helmet. “Very reassuring,” I said to the crew as they looked for my approval.

“We hope it helps, sir.”

I spent the next month planning combat ops for my squadron and there was no doubt I would fly the first mission. Our Gulfstreams had none of that counter-threat stuff, the only thing we had going for us was that we were relatively quiet and fast……...

Bombardier (Canadair) CL601-1A Challenger N214FW (msn 3008 built 1983) and registered to Dinama Aircorp Inc was reportedly shot down by the Venezuelan military and crashed into the Caribbean Sea off the Island of Aruba on January 29. It was alleged the aircraft had departed on an illegal flight from an airport in Apure State, Venezuela, and was being pursued after failing to communicate with authorities. The military action reportedly happened over Venezuelan territorial waters and three occupants of the aircraft were killed.

The Dutch Safety Board released a comprehensive report Tuesday on the July 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Through painstaking analysis, investigators concluded that the Boeing 777 was brought down by a Russian-made Buk missile fired from territory controlled by Russian-backed rebels in Ukraine. Two-hundred ninety-eight people were killed. Dutch prosecutors have also joined the investigation.

So now we know what we already knew. The problem is that Western authorities continue to treat MH17 as a forensic puzzle and a criminal act rather than a moral outrage and a warning of the danger that Vladimir Putin’s adventure in Ukraine poses to the interests and values of Europe.

The Russian President has signed, and then violated, two cease-fire agreements with the Ukrainian government since MH17 was shot down. The second of these agreements was negotiated with the leaders of Germany and France. Yet European consensus behind the sanctions on Russia continues to fray, even as the Kremlin is stepping up its military intervention in Syria.

Governments and aviation authorities have learned some lessons from MH17. European and United Nations authorities last week warned airlines about the danger of flying over Iraq, Iran and the Caspian Sea, lest passenger jets get caught out by the missiles Mr. Putin is firing toward Syria. The Dutch report faults Ukrainian authorities for not establishing a no-fly zone before MH17. Perhaps governments should be quicker to do so in the future.

That might improve passenger safety. But the larger point is that commercial aviation, like so many global civilian endeavors, depends upon predictable conditions and routine procedures on the ground. Western leaders who aren’t prepared to uphold world order against reckless men like Mr. Putin had better get ready for an ever-expanding no-fly zone—and future Flight 17s.